The Writers Guild's negotiations with the producers' alliance picked up steam a few weeks back, when the directors guild's new contract resolved most of the disagreements that had kept the writers off the job for three months.

The producers and writers were close enough last week for the union chiefs to call in the membership for Saturday meetings in New York and Los Angeles to talk through the new deal. Rank and file at both meeting seemed happy enough with the terms of the new agreement. A vote will likely follow on Tuesday, barring a major surprise, and work in Hollywood could resume as early as Wednesday.

So the Dream Factory is back in business, cranking away, projecting all of your fondest hopes and scariest nightmares into wisecracking families, hardworking cops and miraculous, if razor-tongued and wildly libidinous, doctors.

Still, don't rejoice just yet. It should take six weeks or two months for newly produced episodes to reach your TV. And given what the strike has already done to the pilot season -- which ought to be in high gear right now -- next fall's schedule will look a lot more familiar than new seasons usually do.

Meanwhile, the crisis atmosphere the strike inspired has led to a litany of other changes in the TV industry. Some are overdue, given the ongoing revolutions wrought by cable, DVRs and the Internet. But other changes are merely cost-cutting moves dictated by corporate bosses whose interest in TV begins and ends with the numbers on their quarterly profit-and-loss reports. And bear in mind that when NBC ber-executive Jeff Zucker talks about how strike-related losses have created an urgent need to cut costs at the network, he's still talking about one branch in a vast conglomerate whose 2007 profits came within a whisker of -- yes, that's right -- a billion dollars.

So wah, wah, wah.

Nevertheless, Zucker is leading the charge toward the networks' new era of whittled-down expenses and streamlined processes. Some of the changes do make sense. Why, for instance, do the networks still adhere so rigidly to the rhythms of the fall season? Having every network work in lockstep -- all commissioning scripts, casting and producing pilots and then going into production at the same time -- succeeds mostly in making everyone frantic. Though there's some economic sense in laying out the fall schedules at the same time, in May (thereby prompting advertisers to buy most of the time for their spots well in advance of the new season), the significance of the fall season may soon shrink.

Think about it. Having every network premiere the bulk of its new and returning shows during the same few weeks in September and October, sometimes with three or six or more new shows hitting the air on the same night, only guarantees that hardly any of them will get much attention. Cable channels (and the networks, to a lesser extent) already unveil new shows throughout the year. So why not launch the networks' biggest, splashiest shows all year long?

Other structural changes within the industry also may soon affect the breadth and quality of the shows that turn up on your screen. Until now, the networks have made it a practice to commission many more pilot scripts than they could ever produce. Then, only a small percentage of the pilots that do get produced end up making it onto the network schedule.

According to some estimates, the networks spend a combined $500 million a year on shows that never see the light of day. You can imagine how this strikes the network execs. "A welfare system," according to one of them.

The few pilots that do get produced will be far less elaborate than before. Many won't even be full episodes, but 10- or 20-minute "presentations" that don't include the sort of special effects that can run a pilot's budget into the tens of millions.

Everyone needs to live on a budget, I guess. But whether that sort of limited commitment will give a producer/writer the chance to get a seemingly unlikely idea (think "Lost" or "Desperate Housewives") off the ground remains to be seen. And those are the wildly profitable shows that end up paying for all those scripts and pilots that don't get on the air.

No one likes to waste money and time. But while most for-profit businesses can measure their labors in strict columns of numbers, the business of creativity is something other than rational. The most hugely profitable products blossom from the least-promising beginnings. The pilot for "Seinfeld," for instance, prompted such an abysmal response from network focus groups that NBC execs very nearly killed it before it even aired. The show came close to cancellation several times before its ratings picked up -- and it grew eventually into the ratings behemoth and worldwide syndication stalwart it is.

"Emeril," on the other hand, scored massive numbers with NBC's focus groups, though it died quickly once the desperately ill-considered sitcom stumbled onto the air. Same deal for a litany of other hot-testing shows (the Siegfried-and-Roy cartoon "Father of the Pride," for example).

All of which reminds us that the creative process can never be predictable. If experimentation is limited, if visions aren't allowed time and space to find focus, then the schedule almost certainly will fill with the shows that most obviously mimic the formulas of shows that are already on the air. True originality will wither, and programmers will rely even more than they already do on relatively inexpensive, sleazy reality fare such as Fox's "The Moment of Truth," whose central premise involves a lie detector machine, embarrassing questions and ordinary citizens who agree to face public humiliation for cash.

"Truth" does distressingly well in the ratings, though having "American Idol" as a lead-in may have more than a little to do with that. But TV executives like cash, too, and if they can get it as easily as that, without the help of those persnickety union writers, well, that's just good business.

The strike may have earned the writers a bigger chunk of the money from TV's new online business. But if they were hoping to earn more respect for their creativity, they've got their own moment of truth coming.